Jeremy Myerson
Well welcome to this session, this is the business thread, our design schools and new B-Schools? My name’s Jeremy Myerson, I’m your chair. Can I introduce the panel – on my left is John Bates, and old friend of mine, adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at the London Business School and John has been in and out of practice industry and education, but what’s interesting is that he has been the architect if you like, as visiting professor at the University of the Arts in London of this fusion between B-School and D-School thinking.
On my right is Christoph Böninger , he headed Siemens design for many years and is a trained industrial designer who trained in Munich and Los Angeles, and Christoph now runs “Brains for Design”, I’m sure he’s going to tell us something about that.
On my far right is Janet Abrams, Director of the Design Institute, the University of Minnesota’s think tank on design futures and Janet is an old friend, an architectural historian, and very much the interplay of commerce, culture, industry, education and so on. So I think we’ve got a very interesting panel to discuss this theme. The issue of course is Business Week has been talking about “Might tomorrow’s business school actually be a design school”?
Everyone is setting up MBAs in design strategy, including my own institution, the Royal College of Art, where we’re working very closely with Imperial College, [muffled] Business School, and rethinking the MBA down there. But should designers – is this a bridge too far, is this unchartered territory? Should designers stick to their knitting? I just picked a very entertaining writer called Dan Saffer, who writes a blog, the Adaptive Path blog, and he’s written a piece recently called “Design Schools – please start teaching design again!”. Let me just read you a little bit of it: “It’s that time of year when Adaptive Path wades through stacks of design school student resumes, looking for summer interns and potential hires. As I was doing this, a trend that I had suspected became clear to me. Quite a few design schools no longer teach design. Instead, they teach design thinking, and expect that will be enough. Frankly, it isn’t. I was taught that design has three components: thinking, making and doing. Doing is the synthesis, presentation and evaluation of a design, a bridge between thinking and making. If all design schools are teaching is thinking, well they’re missing the other two thirds of the equation. They have abandoned craft for craze.”
So that was Dan Saffer’s view, and of course there’s been a big argument going on with the Tim Brown’s of this world, Ideo in the States and the Michael Bierut at Pentagram in the States who are arguing for design craft and I think that Tim showed that they’re not mutually exclusive, design thinking and design craft.
So that’s our theme for this session. I’m going to ask John to kick off with a few remarks, and then we’ll go round the panel.
John Bates
Jeremy, thanks very much indeed. Good morning everybody, it’s a real pleasure to be back in Newcastle. I did my first job out of business school at International Paint in Felling where I set up a new business there, and it’s great setting up a business with somebody else’s money; you can make all the mistakes in the world and we did at that time, but we came up with the world’s most successful solvent-free coating business, which was great.
I think it’s probably incumbent on me as the sort of sacrificial lamb here to maybe say what business schools actually do, because I think they suffer from some of the same things that the blog identifies, and many people say that business schools ought to get back to teaching business, instead of doing what they drifted into over time. It’s probably good to take a quick historical perspective. Business schools really started in the 1890s, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, really to run the railways. They were operational management schools, they were about leading very large groups of people doing a very straightforward, functional task, making the trains run on time. And then that evolved in the 20s and through to the 40s as running the multi-business firm and the rise of General Motors, and Alfred Sloanes and the book about “My Years at General Motors” is the very classic of that time, the line and staff organisation, so that was very much about managing resources along the way.
Then we discovered economics and computers – the worst thing that ever happened to business in about the 1960s, and then it all became about finance, it all became very analytical, it became about understanding the analytical levers that you can pull and the leverage buyout or private equity, as it’s now called, wave that came from that, which we’re now suffering the indigestion from.
What’s happened really since the 1990s, and has really been driven by the students more than the faculty, as faculties tend to get more and more refined in what they want to do as sectors become more mature, but really driven by students – actually they want to take control of their own lives. They don’t see themselves as cannon-fodder for the Fortune 500, and there’s been a huge shift away from just learning about the analytical, just learning about managing resources, to actually understanding leadership and opportunity, which is the heart of entrepreneurship. So that has become the metaphor for general management very much in a lot of business schools, and to me, where we’re going and where we are at the moment in pursuing that opportunity-driven, and a definition of entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control, is very much about convergence, and for that reason we’ve set up links with UCL on the science space, and the University of the Arts on the creative and design side. And bringing the students together at the Masters level in the same classes, working on projects together, to look at how do we actually learn from each other – all that intersection stuff that we talked about. And it’s wonderful, I was in class yesterday with 60 students. 30 from London Business School, 30 from the University of the Arts, from about I think 40 different countries. An incredible mixing that’s going on and some great opportunities and projects hopefully arising. That’s what business schools are at the moment, or at least ours is anyway!
Jeremy Myerson
Thank you John. Christoph
Christoph Böninger
My background is as a designer but I’m still kind of schizophrenic now because on the one side I’m still a designer, not a design manager any more as it was for Siemens, but I’m serving on the board of a German company with sales of 30 billion euros. I see both sides. When I read the title, “Are Design Schools the New Business Schools?”, I thought, well actually that title implies that design schools might be the better business schools.
And then of course my second question was, well what does “better” mean, or in which kind of terms do you define “better”? In terms of business, which means profit maximisation? Or in terms of design, which means kind of a cultural optimisation? As Tim and Frans pointed out this morning already. Then my next thought was then, well, what are we really actually facing as a society? And also as Tim already pointed out, we are facing global warming, shortening resources etcetera and then how do we educate the next generation to tackle these challenges? Is it as a business school or is it a design school? I think we have no time to really think about that because we need the best of two.
Then of course the question, how do we bring the best of the two schools together, and what is the best in view of the challenges? And it’s not about business or design, but business and design, but in different grades or graduations. One industry which already did this many years ago is the movie industry. If you go to a film academy, you have different kinds of professionals and the design schools still teach design, funnily enough. With some they teach graphics and fashion and industrial design, fine; but it’s always just the design process they actually teach, or the design experience process, and that’s where we can learn from.
Another very exciting role model I saw is being exercised in the Netherlands now with Philips, at Philips design and the University of Utrecht where they form so-called “value networks”, they bring practising business people and designers together on a horizontal level, which means equal level not a hierarchy, and basically what they are trying to achieve is educating so-called enablers which bring the two worlds together because my opinion is they will always be separated. The characters or the DNA of the business person is different from that of a designer, and if you want to mix that you get the burst of the two. There are very few people who really are good enablers, I don’t know how many, how often Apple will be quoted this time, but Steve Jobs once said a wonderful quote to be an enabler, by being asked “What is your most important job at Apple?” and he said: “Actually I’m a shit-deflecting umbrella for my designers against my corporate guys”. And you need these kind of shit-deflecting umbrellas. Where do they come from? Let’s discuss it.
Male speaker
Termites?
Jeremy Myerson
OK, so we’ve had John, who’s mixing it up and pulling it together, and Christoph, who says the DNA is different, don’t mix it. So, Janet?
Janet Abrams
I run a small research centre at a very large public state-funded university in Minnesota, where for the last couple of years we’ve been thinking about what kind of a new programme might we set up with the initial rubric of “product design.” During the processes of research, I looked at a lot of the material that I know that Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week has been relying on, and I find that very much the same information is in the back of the Cox Review: the Cox Review has looked at Business Week’s rather arbitrary grids of D-schools that are the new B-schools, or B-schools that have one or two courses out of an entire MBA program that touch design. Does that really constitute becoming a D-school? So, I’m here to tell you that there are a lot more design schools in the US than the few that you hear about over here. Obviously the d.school at Stanford has been very much in people’s minds and also IIT in Chicago, the Institute of Design there, under Patrick Whitley’s directorship; but there are many many other programmes that are developing. Even places in Chicago like Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has a product development programme.
So I want you to be aware of the skew of the information and how it gets taken up — kind of 'the grass is greener across the Atlantic' — and that it’s something to be very cautious about. I would actually recommend one of the few essays I’ve read that actually puts any of this in perspective. It was published by Blueprint as a 'Broadside' by James Heartfield, called 'The Creativity Gap', and I presume there’s a joke there about 'minding the gap.' He really takes apart the notions of creativity, innovation, design, as they’ve been sold back to British industry, and through the Design Council’s agencies as well.
I have to say that I think this dichotomy between the D- and the B-school reminds me of an essay by C P Snow: 'The Two Cultures', the Rede lecture of 1959. It kept coming back to me, the more I read these blogs about B versus D, where he was talking about that point in the post second world war era, about the division between the literary intelligentsia and the scientific intelligentsia, of which he was actually one of the few interlocutor figures — he was both a scientist and a novelist and was able to move fluidly between those worlds and was very rare in that capacity. I would say that at that point the economic threats were the US and Russia and now we’re looking at the 'Chindia' phenomenon. In the late 1800s it was Germany, the dye and chemical industry, that was one of the big threats to the US as it was developing its economy. So again these things are not brand new; they’re newly inflected.
One of the interesting things I’ve come across about how business schools see this was summed up very well in an interview in an online journal called 'NextD' with a couple of professors from Case Western Reserve, Fred Collopy (I hope I’m pronouncing it right) and Richard J Boland Jr. Richard Boland says:
'Over the last 10 years businesses have seen that the design of products and services are critical to their success, they’ve seen that collaboration across organisation boundaries is essential and that familiar ways of doing business are not just good enough. In business schools, on the other hand, we see a growing emphasis on financial analysis and financial engineering' — very much what you were saying, John — 'and the narrowing of student vision, an effort to have one way of seeing business and its values displace all others. Business schools focus more and more on stereotypical alternatives. Students are trained to see those alternatives that fit into their models, can be analyzed by their decision techniques – the result is a failure of imagination and a tendency to reproduce the past. So it is the failure of our business schools to create a truly educated person that we are reacting to when we reach out to design and design thinking. We believe a growing emphasis on design can provide an antidote to the overly-constrained view of reality that business schools present their students.'
You can find that at NextD.org – it was the eighth conversation in a series conducted by Garry VanPatter.
So I would say that some of these issues are not just about design schools needing to change; it’s really about — again as John pointed out — the evolution of the teaching of management. I would like to see both sets of schools drop their pre-suppositions. It’s interesting to note how the bottom-up communication that we are reading a lot about — sustainability, and the emergent behaviour that Tim Brown pointed out — seems to be almost fundamentally at odds with the managerial structure of top-down organisation, which I presume is still what most big businesses are based on. So I would say we need to think again about both management education and design education. How are emergent systems, new means of communication, smaller businesses able to do what it took a lot more capital and infrastructure to do 20, 50, 100 years ago — things that can now be achieved by smaller group of people? Those are some of the issues I’d like to throw out.
Jeremy Myerson
OK thank you very much Janet. A really encyclopaedic view across that both the teaching of management, as well as the teaching of design, has got to move on. One of the interesting things I find, I mean I work in an institution, the RCA, where we are backing both horses, you know – we are fighting tooth and nail to maintain a very deep studio culture, the design craft, a two-year full-time MA in an era when everyone’s doing a one year fast track MA, and we are fighting tenaciously to hang onto that studio craft experience.
At the same time, we’re also building this big strategic relationship with our large neighbours round the corner, and what’s interesting is, when you look at the evolution of the teaching of management and the evolution of the teaching of design, we live in an uncertain age, we live in a more complex age. I think Tim and Frans explain that very well. We live in a more ambiguous age and who is better at dealing with ambiguity? – designers, who live with it every day, creating something new, or business models which John very eloquently described some of the limitations and the closed thinking and structures around it.
So I think you’ve got a wide range of views on this table. I’d like to hear from people in the audience come back at any of the speakers. Gentleman there, Chatham House rules, say what you like! Just tell us who you are and where you’re from?
Audience member 1
I’m Simon Rucker from Seymourpowell. I work in the Foresight Division so ex-designer, moved across.
Jeremy Myerson
Ex-designer? Why?
Audience member 1
I don’t design, I no longer raise a pen in anger!
Jeremy Myerson
Ah but are you thinking about design?
Audience member 1
You always of course remain one! What I thought was interesting was, several people mentioned it before, they talked about innovation and innovation is the perennial buzz word these days. And yet I always find it interesting, if you ever ask anyone in a room what their definition of innovation is, they’ll go … and they stop because they don’t have a definition of innovation. It’s like if you ask someone about design or brand or creativity, they all think they know but they don’t know. I think David Lord Sainsbury had a brilliant definition, which is “the successful exploitation of new ideas”, and within that definition, it’s a brilliant definition because it’s so succinct, you kind of sum up what we’re talking about, what this whole issue’s about. There are some people who are better at creating new ideas, and some people who are better at successfully exploiting them, and really although it’s perhaps a slightly simplistic distinction, but designers tend to be better at creating new ideas, they tend to be better at lateral thinking, thinking up new things, making connections that we’ve been seeing before, and business people tend to be better at exploiting those ideas, seeing potential in them and turning them into businesses.
Jeremy Myerson
Is that true, John?
John Bates
I sort of struggle with this, because I feel it’s taking us up an intellectual blind alley that puts people in boxes, which worries me. Two of the most successful entrepreneurs I know who’ve built very substantial businesses – one was a musician and the other was an astrophysicist, and the only common thread I can find between those two is pattern recognition – they could actually spot things slightly ahead of everybody else, and they were able to move quickly and take those ideas and put them into practice by building great teams. So it’s something about leadership, it’s something about the ability to synthesise in real time, and then do something about it, because we all have great ideas all the time, we just don’t do anything about them most of the time, then it’s too late.
Audience member 1
I suppose the response is to say, are you arguing for the exception proving the rule? Whereas I say it doesn’t. I think the point is that we’re not arguing for, to use the metaphor of languages, we’re not asking for bilingual people, we’re asking for people who are excellent in articulating themselves…
John Bates
But the evidence is that successful businesses usually require a binary star, usually at the heart of them there is the innovator, forward-looking or the outward-looking person and the inward-looking person who makes the trains run on time. And those binaries are usually unstated, some of them you never know who they are. But that really is at the heart and there’s nothing wrong with that, I think it’s getting that synthesis right is what’s important.
Jeremy Myerson
OK, gentleman there…?
Audience member 2
Hi, I’m Patrick Towl, I realised that being a strategic designer for 10 years but I only knew that two years ago. I never thought I could call myself a designer because I didn’t make things, and so there is there issue of whether it’s allowed, if you never actually craft a thing, or use a pen in anger that’s not actually a black one. I’ve thought a lot about this and one of the reasons why is I advise executives on how they can use design in their strategy and business planning. I think being a leader is about setting goals, because their job is to direct things, and the direction is from setting objectives. I think probably one of the morning’s comments was about this thing about briefs not being right, and the designer waiting for a brief, and I suppose one of the experiences I’ve had in every project I’ve done is there never has been a brief. I’ve always literally had to write my own brief, even when working with the Design Council…which is great, because I actually genuinely came up with new stuff, so I’ve got a comment and a question – is there something here about objectives setting and goal setting? Is the strategic use of design in the creation of the right set of goals before you go about doing stuff where the upstream work is, the application of design to the creation of those inevitably hierarchies of goals, which are quite complex, and have the interdependencies built into them there, because otherwise what you are doing is you are carefully crafting the wrong thing, so the environmental stuff coming in now is because we’ve actually been ignoring a key goal which should have been there a long time ago.
Jeremy Myerson
OK, interesting, so you know designers have got to frame the problem, rather than just answer the problem that they receive. Christoph, in your experience with Siemens, and I’ll come onto Rachel in a minute, your experience with Siemens, has there been a sea change? Do you think you were designing a lot of stuff that the world didn’t really want or need?
Christoph Böninger
Yes. I think we designed tons of cellphones which the world didn’t need, but the issues which you just mentioned – designers in the more strategic term, it’s like an iceberg – you see maybe 5 per cent at the tip over the surface and then 95 per cent under water are the ones which actually make the impact in today’s economy. I remember we once designed a workflow of a hospital, similar to what Tim said, for a company, and the CEO actually had acquired a new company and he wanted to utilise the design process to merge the two cultures of the two companies to bring them with one joint new product generation into one culture, and that worked fantastically. There was a Siemens company being sold to another company because with the design process, you don’t bring the people together by hard facts like you have to decrease the costs, and you have to be quicker and faster, etc, but you really pick them up on an emotional level, and that worked fantastically. The CEO was a business person and he was the typical business guy and he was very creative, but he really realised the potential of the design process. So there’s no contradiction, he was not a designer and he never wanted to be one and he never actually also interfered with the design process. You do it, it’s your job.
Jeremy Myerson
Can I just bring in Rachel Cooper?
Rachel Cooper
I just wanted to ask, are we thinking a bit too narrowly about this relationship between business and design? If we’re thinking about all the things that Tim was talking about, like the economic, social, environmental issues of it, of convergent technologies, should we not be thinking about the relationship between design and everything else? Environmental sciences departments, social sciences departments; I mean I’ve just taken the risk of taking a team of designers to a university that hasn’t got a design department to actually work with all the other departments in the university. It’s a bit of a risk, I don’t know if it’s going to work; obviously working with the management school as well, but we’re limiting ourselves if we just look at this two-way relationship because there are so many more challenges. I mean the RCA has been doing it for a long time through the Helen Hamlyn Institute. If we’ve got to learn about new materials, new technology, we need to sweep across the whole of the university academic direction, rather than just the business school. I just wondered if anybody had thought about that.
Jeremy Myerson
OK, Janet, do you want to pick that up then we’ll open it up?
Janet Abrams
That’s why I tend to the grandiose. One of the missions of the Design Institute when it was set up seven years ago was to try and do that kind of radar-sweep for ideas, whatever department. There was a visionary President at the time at the University who decided that design thinking was a kind of lingua franca - the way that economics or biology are transcendent subject matter - and instituted, for example, an undergraduate minor in design that students who are majoring in other subjects could take, so that they have an experience of or an exposure to design. I think the problem with that, which goes back to Steve Jobs' shit-deflecting umbrella figure, is that, unless you’ve got, just as in industry, you’ve got a really strong patron of that way of doing things, you’re going to run up against, in different ways, in different departments and colleges, the silos that somebody had a diagram of earlier today – and their different cultures. For example, biochemistry and nanotechnology are not the same even though they’re in the science section of the University. So it’s a great utopian vision, and I take my hat off to anybody who can really push that through. But what you are going to need to make that even feasible is a reasonably long-term patron, allowing the other point of view to enter, and then have a kind of catch them, and really the question is, how do we educate those people?
Rachel Cooper
I would say, actually yesterday I listened to Sir David King, who’s the government’s chief scientific advisor, and he set up the Forsythe programme, actually trying to bring together scientists to tackle an issue from a whole perspective. At the moment he’s looking at mental well being, and mental capital, and brings a whole group of people together to look at that issue in depth and give the government some policy. That inter-discipline way of thinking and developing your parties is going through funding councils and the way we hold research and will affect the universities, because that drives the universities – if that’s where the money’s going, that might help us develop that in the UK anyway.
Jeremy Myerson
But is it possible for designers to know about everything?
Rachel Cooper
No.
Jeremy Myerson
Jan?
Jan
I was just going to day something.
Jeremy Myerson
You could introduce yourself?
Jan
My name’s Jan, I’m a design strategist for a design consultant called [muffled] Associates. I wondered in all of this, you’re talking about lots of different types of people who have their own specialities, all trying to communicate. I think sometimes a poor ability to be able to communicate in all sorts of different languages is not being recognised here. We are trying to get people to work in different ways. You have to be able to communicate with them in different ways. Design and our ability to visualise and communicate across so many different levels is valuable in its own right, and generally when you operate at that level that’s exactly what you’re doing, you are just trying to get people to operate on a common plane. So it’s thinking and linking but it’s also communicating in all sorts of different ways so you’re weaving stuff. And that I think is a skill set in certain way that no-one seems to talk about.
Jeremy Myerson
Hmm, can you teach it?
Jan
I don’t know
Audience member 2
Anna Proust from Nottingham Trent University.
Jeremy Myerson
Can everybody hear OK at the back? Are the acoustics alright?
Audience member 2
A discussion that’s happening at Nottingham Trent both across the Masters, which is broad and goes right across all the design disciplines, in a framework both students work together, but also across the University, it is about needing actually to draw a whole range of skills and disciplines as Rachel says.
Because the problems and the issues that we want to tackle are not disciplinary, they are coming from all manner of different directions and what we have been experimenting with is by inviting researchers and students from across the University to come and talk to their response to their particular issues and particular situations, and we’re finding this is an extremely fruitful way of achieving the sort of communication that you are talking about, but also drive forward projects where people are involved for a greater or lesser amount of their time, and hopefully the outcome will be that we find new ways of teaching.
Jeremy Myerson
Isn’t that a scary educational model though? – for those who are already in design practice who’ve had a conventional design training, and now they’re being told: ‘You’re a small design consultant with a monoculture, and you’ve got to access social anthropologists, ethnographers, business strategists’. I’m interested to hear from designers in the audience? – Other than Simon? – I will come back to you, Simon. I’m keen to get as many people speaking as possible.
Audience member 3
Steve Water from Glasgow – I’ve just been teaching youngsters 15 year olds who are taking their higher’s in Product Design and one of the things that struck me is that there’s an emphasis to try and encourage more of these students to become more enterprising and to move on and to, to become, to join the design schools and we were trying to inspire them to do this but they, they’d already been streamed out. The kids who are seen to be more able were streamed out yet they and there were groups of children who were less, seemed to be less able. Yet it was the lesser able kids that seemed to be much freer in their ideas, they came up with the more challenging ideas. They weren’t so afraid to, to demonstrate the sort of work they were doing and I wonder whether the kids who are perceived to be more able of being judged by and outdated set of metrics than actually they might be you know, just being forced into the wrong type of box.
John Bates
I think it’s a real selection problem and we do probably have an older view of the world in how we’re selecting particularly for further and higher education. I mean that’s a societal issue. I mean certainly within the, the cobalt’s that I deal with of students from Central St Martins, London Business School, College of Fashion whatever it is, you know what I’m finding is, an incredible diversity of skills. The problem is getting them to talk a common language and that, I’m going back to your point, is now where do you get the common language and actually what I’ve found. Ultimately whether you’ve got somebody who’s, you know spouts DSF’s over here and somebody on the designs aesthetic over there. When you start and focus on what does the customer need, you know what is the problem, what is the customer paying, what is the unsolved problem? Actually all of that goes away and they start bringing, which is probably what you find as well. If you can focus it around you know, that common bowl of solving this problem with the different skills and that’s the, and they do it themselves. I mean we sit there and just try and sort of you know, keep the warring factions apart when they you know, get them to dispute but I mean, just enabling that is, is really what but helping develop a language that’s common and I’d be interested in other peoples experience in doing that because that’s the big challenge I think we face.
Jeremy Myerson
OK gentleman in the green shirt there.
Audience member 4
My name’s David Rafa, I have been a designer and now I work at the University of Leeds. Really a very simple question, nothing very complicated conversation but, we want these magic people so to control teams of these people, what do these students actually come to do because normally students go to University to do something, to design, go to business school, to go to medic school or something? What do these new type of students come to do. Now same question really but your second bit is, the emphasis we’ve always had on the single degree being much more valuable than a degree in a main subject. Is that still viable, so you know this debate, do you teach experts or do you teach generalists?
Jeremy Myerson
OK experts of generalists? Janet.
Janet Abrams
You need both.
Well, this, I’m not going to be able to give an answer right now I’m afraid at this moment. I think.
Audience member 4
Sorry but shouldn’t you be able to if you’ve been looking at this for a length of time?
Janet Abrams
Well… that’s another discussion about where and when. I think that there may be a kind of set of, of skills that would be taught but they would not necessarily correlate with the design disciplines as currently departmentalised. They might cut across those, having to look at you know, materials - irrespective of whether your going to make a building out of it or a piece of clothing or perhaps a, a small hand held object - or looking at information systems and having an ability to do that pattern recognition. Looking at how ideas actually enter culture. So maybe we need some of those alternate slices that to varying extents, already run through the categories that we have instantiated in degree programmes at design schools. Maybe there’s a way to do a kind of lateral cut and to start focusing, like this lady [Rachel Cooper] here said, not so much on disciplines but on issues or problems. But again, I mean I, I’ve also sort of spent a little time chewing over this notion that the user, the end user, this fictional character is the kind of ... they provide the answers if we can only kind of imagine them well enough and I think there’s a lot of presupposition and that idea that maybe needs unpacking at this point too. To what extent is that figure, the user, really a projection of all of our own individuals’ sort of educational baggage? So, I think there are possibly some skills that might be brought together in a different configuration than what you get if you go through like an interior designer or an architecture degree right now.
Jeremy Myerson
OK, gentleman there.
Audience member 5
My name’s Michiel Schwarz, I’m from Amsterdam, and I’m an independent cultural advisor but I’m also involved partly in the Design Academy Eindhoven where 3 years ago I was asked to set up a new lateral — maybe that’s the word — department to look more at the context, the social context, of design. And I want to follow up really this point about lateral thinking. Because we’ve seen a lot of Venn diagrams also this morning. I think that’s what we’re talking about before. I mean I’ve been drawing them for probably 10 years now, just about everything I’ve done from advising the government on cultural policy to working in a design institute in Holland but, for sake of argument, you know we seem to have 2 now, design schools, business schools, you can have 3, you can have 4. You have to have a middle bit. Of course the middle bit only exists because the circles exist. No-one’s claiming that they all should be superimposed. I mean one circle should fit in there and more should be generalist. So we have to do both, we have to make sure design schools still educate designers and we’re going to have a little discussion how functional they are and whether they make products or where there’s more design thinking and we need business schools and other schools in order to also have groups of people who fit in the middle and we may have to have a different curriculum for that. I see this at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, it’s like 20 per cent of the design students, more or less, are really interested in more social, contextual questions than conceptual things and so on. I’m sure that the business schools, may be a similar number of them, can deal with these contradictions. So it’s not so much a question of what do we teach them, not so much the subjects, but more. I mean I mentioned four things: one is conceptual thinking which as you know, you’re an example of, fortunately it’s already happening from this analytical financial to. but in terms of concept I see it at the Design Academy that I’m involved in, in fact, that’s one of the trump cards of why the Design Academy Eindhoven is so well known in the world.
The second thing is reflexivity. You know, just to be able to distance yourself a little bit from your own subject and then go back to it, whether you’re in business or design school, any education media. Thirdly, the ability to recognise the importance of context. Well, we’ve heard a lot about this before but context is a small context because the difference between working in public, for a public service or a company is that the context is the environment. I don’t care but the importance of context for the content. And fourthly, what I would call the shift from the functionalist perspective to processes of making meaning. Things that are meaningful and purposeful. All these are sort of very fundamental questions but if you ask them in a business school and you ask them in design school — just because we have these two schools that we now have put on the table — you get different things that people do, different schools probably different courses. And I’m sure if you introduced these four things, that there would be a large group of people that come from business schools and from design that can actually communicate with one another.
Jeremy Myerson
OK thank you. People who haven’t spoken before, Tim Parsons.
Audience member 6
Thank you I’m Tim Parsons from Camberwell College. I thought it was interesting point that Steve brought up about the streaming of students and maybe we should actually think about streaming the, the craft as, or the kind of people who craft the end product and design and the, the enablers and strategists. At an earlier point, because teaching at University, there’s a lot of talk about transferable skills and it’s often used as a get out clause, I think for the Universities to kind of justify courses that have apparently low employment figures in terms of who’s going into the design profession and but that kind of thing kind of, doesn’t recognise the idea of design education as a, as a life skill and as something that has a wider application but if you’ve also, if you’ve got these two apparently different types of person coming out. Then maybe you know, they need to be recognised before they get into this position in University where they’re on one course and they have to decide which route to take and also, obviously the tutors have to, to actually try and decide what is the best route because obviously we do need both but also, we need to have a situation where those skills can be recognised.
Jeremy Myerson
Yeah, OK gentleman there.
Audience member 7
Paul Stately, Glasgow School of Art. I suppose the, it’s a question not a statement around internationalisation and whether the panel and my peers think that there is something that relates to cultural identity and habits that relates to design. For instance, I work in Beijing and I’ve, I go out to San Hose and work with American students, and there’s a very, a clear difference in the way that the students respond as designers and I think it’s to do with politics, culture. I think it’s to do with the way that American students, the notion of problem solving is almost an anathema because they go straight to the solution. There’s, it’s not a, it’s not the diagram that we saw by the first speaker where there’s a kind of wonderful amorphic mess which is more …
Jeremy Myerson
That was the woman shopping by the way.
Audience member 7
I wouldn’t call it a mess – she spends money…and the, the, my question is would you agree that there is a particular trait and if that’s the case. Why is, are the European educational institutions trying to push people into this great big loop of thinking design. Design thinking whereas actually skills design which is the dominant and prevalent culture in those particular countries, if you, if you’ll run with me on the gross (41.47)
Jeremy Myerson
OK I’m going to bring in a gentleman here and then I’m going to go to John.
Audience member 8
Hi, Nick Spencer from Northumbria University. One of the things that I’ve sort of picked up on while people have been talking and in teaching students as well is that there seems to be a number of different sort of forms of enquiry. So you have the sort of reflective propositional enquiry of typically design students and then possibly the more critical rationalism of business school students and that is a, is a generalisation because both forms of enquiry are important in both situations but the materials that they use to form their enquiry are different. So, the business school learn the language of numbers and work with a different set of materials and the design students again, work with a different set of materials and different set of skills. Are we suggesting that there is an integrative form of enquiry where both different epistemologies actually fit together?
Jeremy Myerson
John.
John Bates
I would say yes and I think a lot of it comes down to understanding effective teams and team dynamics. I mean the, you know the starving artist or the sole brilliant design inspiration, while that might be a start is not the execution. You know it does require that, you know that team to come together to make these things real and to make them live and become you know, life changing or society changing. So I, you know I think yes there is an absolute you know sort of role for understanding how we work together and actually that’s about creating at least some common shared language and common shared experience as early as possible that covers, covers the pieces. For example I mean now, as a required course for all the MBA’s who come to me at London Business School, they have to do a course called Discovering Entrepreneurial Opportunities and that is purely about observation, about customer needs. Not making any judgements, not trying to design anything at this stage but just trying to observe what the customer needs are and then working in teams coming up with possible solutions, which they have to prototype very crudely and actually pitch them to other people, say would you back this.
Now that actually creates a fantastic learning experience for these very varied, I’d love to be able to do that with you know the RCA people at the same time and you know take it on to the next level. That’s maybe where we’re going in these sorts of crossovers but it doesn’t get away from the fact that if you don’t have the craft skills as well and we have craft skills in organisations, marketing, finance all that stuff, then you don’t get anywhere. My biggest problem I’ve had in, in, with interfacing with people from CSM and, and Camberwell and places is often that they come straight through undergraduate into a Masters programme and does actually no real work experience along the way and so you’ve actually got a problem because all my MBA’s have 5 years work experience and that’s often where you get you know, the conflict because it’s great to have idealism but idealism with a bit of practical tempering actually helps along the way. So you know, there’s a, there’s a sort of phasing issue here but the end goal is can you make better teams developing better products that solve real problems? Absolutely.
Jeremy Myerson
OK, gentleman there, yeah.
Audience member 9
Justin Connect. Centre for Design Innovation in Ireland. I have a question about, can we, should we, are we teaching behaviour as a skill? And I mean I’m talking about curiosity drives ideas. Should we be teaching curiosity as a skill? If we talk about diversity driving innovation, how are we teaching, are we, should we, can we teach what’s it like to seek diversity? Are we teaching failure as a, as a behavioural practice, should we, can we, are we doing that?
Jeremy Myerson
OK Christoph. Inside Semen’s, did you teach people to be curious?
Christoph Böninger
No I think you can’t teach people to become curious. Either they are or they’re not. I mean you can, you can inspire them to look into a certain field but pure curiosity I think anyway. Let me tell you about a different experiment, I mean here we’re talking about the difference, this huge difference between business and design. The equivalent of Stanford MBA in the German speaking world in Switzerland, they had already a couple of years established a corporation of designers and business MBA students and the outcome was to them not radical enough because actually they are not so different. They’re curious, they’re eager to learn, they’re extremely ambitious and they are young, fresh, talented people. They exchange to designers because they all, they wanted to have a solution against artists, art students because they’re more radical because what they say and that is really interesting. It said a true entrepreneur, that’s the same like an artist. The entrepreneur leaves all his business cases at the end of the day and all his experiences behind him and steps into a totally new area or, or market where he has no experiences where only, the only thing he has is his intuition, the same as an artist. An artist also leaves behind his set of aesthetic skills etc, etc and really goes into a new land and that’s why they combined artists and MBA students and we sponsored was the [muffled] Foundation, a course this spring and they outcome was extremely radical. Much more radical than what you usually see in the joined corporation of business students and design students. It’s all nice, yes it’s important. Design observation, design thinking etc, etc but it really helps inspire the society about our crude problems, I seriously really doubt it.
Audience member 9
I’m just curious to hear from the other people on the panel on that. Just working in Creole in the States we spent a lot of time talking about the difference between creativity and imagination. Kind of what you’re saying is, there are people that are, that are generally creative and we started to stray away from that term because one boy summed it up well and said, ‘Everyone has an imagination, some people just don’t choose to use it’. And I’m, I’m just curious. I think, well, my point is, I think you can teach people to, to use their imagination more, they may not be naturally creative but I’m just curious to hear from each of you about that of, behaviour as a skill.
Janet Abrams
Well I just have a sort of, it’s maybe a side track, but my reaction is idea that you can’t say that creativity is either there or it’s not or that - I beg your pardon - curiosity is either innate or it isn’t. And I think we’re, we’re focussing mostly today on the population of undergraduates and graduates students, right? Kind of what you call postgraduate here I think? And one of the programmes we run is a camp for teenagers. I think that came up somewhere else and it’s so striking that when given the opportunity to like mess around and actually handle things and draw or start to make with their own hands that young teenagers, who frankly don’t get any of that in their high school training, that’s in the US or at least where we are, come alive. Some of the, you know the, the assumed failures are suddenly skilled and have, you know imagination and lots to offer that they would never have found if they hadn’t stumbled into this little programme for a week. And so, my guess is that, there’s something that’s stunting, that in the probably very, you know soon after kindergarten because we think of kindergarten as a sort of free for all, you know playful environment and there are our school systems. I don’t know so much about the UK anymore but my guess is that the whole thing about standards and sort of measurements is, you know, well intended, but it’s reinforcing some of the kind of tamping down of precisely those kinds of radical instincts that young children have until it’s kind of squashed out of them at some point, maybe in primary school here. This discussion doesn’t just sort of begin with lets say the MBA population. It really goes much, you know, deeper and earlier. If you want to encourage the kind of people who will be able to do this kind of interdisciplinary connecting, who can broker between people who are specialists and I, I really respect deep disciplinary expertise, don’t misunderstand that. That’s necessary too, and we need to train people who are going to be, you know astrophysicists as well because that’s a big area. You know, each discipline is a lot to, to conquer. There’s a danger at the moment I think of people talking about designers as if they’re kind of all things to all disciplines and all people, all places, all cultures, all the time. And it’s like, you know James Woudhuysen is maybe giving a talk on this, this afternoon. So you know, while we need to cut across, we still also need to encourage those who have let’s say an aptitude or a gift in some direction but we also need to kind of keep opening up opportunities, later I would say in the pre-University system for people to discover other kinds of skills and the kind of what do they called it, 'STEM' - science, technology and math - in the US.
Jeremy Myerson
OK before we all pass out, as Tim Brown said, said: ‘We’re moving from individual behaviour to group behaviour’ so could everybody just get their programme and fan your neighbour.
Fan your neighbour. Everyone fan your neighbour. Brilliant, this feels better already.
Before we finish I’m going to go to the gentleman there and I’m going to go back to Simon. Very short comments please short comments.
Audience member 10
Nick Devit. I’ve been running the education programme for Dott for the last 18 months. It was just someone mentioned about teaching curiosity. Everybody has curiosity up until the age of 5. It’s about rediscovering it not teaching it. It’s something that’s innate within people. And the other thing, most of my education I reckon I learned most of what I do from my peer group and I think and also having finished being trained as a designer in 1991 I learnt most of what I know I reckon from actually doing it so maybe the education system, with the risk of going straight to the solution I thought maybe we just put a design school right next to a business school and let the students find their peer groups and learn from each other.
Jeremy Myerson
OK. Lady there and then Simon and then we’re going to close.
Audience member 11
Just really quickly just following on from that I’ve written down here, instead of B schools and C schools, I think the challenge is to design a C school which is a convergence school.
I don’t believe, I don’t believe any change will happen until the, the educational map is completely wiped clean and there stops being this territory of ‘I own the education of design’, ‘I own the education of business.’ I’m going to take a little bit of that over there, great, I’m going to share a little bit of that over there, great, I’m going to take my students out there, great but it’s not, that will be incremental instead of revolutionary.
Jeremy Myerson
Good, thank you. Simon.
Simon
Both Jan and John because what I’m getting from you in the end and John you mentioned it before saying sometimes in the ways of bringing the teams together, we focus on the needs and what people want. That seems to clear everything and I think that fundamentally wrong because anyone who’s actually worked as a designer will know that if that’s all you do, you come up with wacky situations that are completely irrelevant because you can’t get any return on investment and your capital expenditure. You’ve got factories sitting there waiting to make things etcetera. And I think this whole thing about encouraging creativity I, maybe the panel have already said, you know it’s either there or it’s not. I don’t think it’s a question of being able to teach creativity, I think you can teach rigour, I think you can teach skills but creativity is inherent but I think it’s a bit of a red herring this, because the whole point about design is its creativity within constraints, it’s the ability to make links and find solutions when you’re severely put upon not just to be sort of airy fairy when the pressure’s on.
So I take issue with both of you on that one.
Jeremy Myerson
OK well you can battle that out over lunch. Our allotted hour is up I’m afraid, it whizzed by, I hope that everybody who talked wanted to talk. I think we’ve generated a lot of heat. I hope we’ve generated a lot of light. Can I say thank you to our panel, John Bates, Janet Abrams, Christoph Böninger .